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A review by bmartino
The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner
4.0
I read this book after seeing a blurb about it on io9.com. While I wouldn’t have even picked it up if I hadn’t known that there were some sci-fi/futuristic elements to it, I found myself wishing while reading it that I knew nothing about it. Knowing in advance that definitely affected the way I read it. I picked up on clues I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed; some twists that should have surprised me seemed somewhat anticlimactic.
That said, I found the plot to be very good. I enjoyed the way the characters intersected and interacted. I liked the exploration of the consequences of obsessing over one idea, one puzzle, one person for far too long. Many plot points still surprised me even after I thought I had figured everything out. The ending, which is where a book like this can really fall apart, actually held together and worked. I even skipped playing Skyrim for a full weekend to keep reading. That’s really saying something about how well it held my interest!
The only weakness that bothered me was that it could have done with some more judicious editing. There were places I felt it to be overwritten, although I think the style may be leftover from the author’s previous “true crime” books. A couple instances where the point of view got really confusing; a scene told from one character’s viewpoint all of a sudden shifted to going inside another character’s head for just a couple sentences. And the transition from a third-person to first-person narrator in Part 3 was really jarring and distracting.
But these are minor annoyances and won’t keep me from checking out Renner’s future work. It can only get better, and it’s starting off pretty good already.
Spoiler
time travel was involvedThat said, I found the plot to be very good. I enjoyed the way the characters intersected and interacted. I liked the exploration of the consequences of obsessing over one idea, one puzzle, one person for far too long. Many plot points still surprised me even after I thought I had figured everything out. The ending, which is where a book like this can really fall apart, actually held together and worked. I even skipped playing Skyrim for a full weekend to keep reading. That’s really saying something about how well it held my interest!
The only weakness that bothered me was that it could have done with some more judicious editing. There were places I felt it to be overwritten, although I think the style may be leftover from the author’s previous “true crime” books. A couple instances where the point of view got really confusing; a scene told from one character’s viewpoint all of a sudden shifted to going inside another character’s head for just a couple sentences. And the transition from a third-person to first-person narrator in Part 3 was really jarring and distracting.
But these are minor annoyances and won’t keep me from checking out Renner’s future work. It can only get better, and it’s starting off pretty good already.